Free beta · Windows

ALPHACTORY

A factory game where letters are the resource.

You don't mine ore, you mine letters. A tree is made of the letters of TREE, a belt of the letters of BELT, and a machine costs exactly the letters of its name. Hover a word to see what happens when it is no longer whole.

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Real footage, recorded in the game with its own GIF recorder (Shift+F12).

01

One rule,
and everything follows

Everything in the world is written with the letters of its own name, and a word only keeps its powers while it is whole.

Pull the E out of a TREE and it is no longer a tree, just three letters and a heap. A LAMP shines because it is complete; hit it and it bursts into L, A, M, P, and the night comes back.

Built things are brittle. One blow and a machine bursts into its own letters: the confetti is the reward.

02

Break it, gather it,
spell something new

The whole loop fits in a sentence: explore, break things into letters, move them, sort them, spell words and place them. A placed word has real properties, and it opens new ground.

Break

Wood, rock and living things are sectile: you carve into them and the rest keeps standing. Crystals and machines are brittle: the whole body lets go at once. Cut a redwood's trunk and the crown comes down in a rain of letters.

Gather

A right click vacuums loose letters into your pocket. Letters are ore: common ones are everywhere, and rarity follows English itself. Q, J, Z and X are legendary.

Spell

Press Enter and type a word. If it exists, you discover it for good, and forging it costs exactly its letters from your pocket. Some words cannot be typed at all: PORTAL and BEACON are carved in ruins, deep down.

Take back

Dismantle an object and you get it back whole; smash it and you get its letters. Every letter is accounted for by a ledger the game audits against itself.

03

Shovel, pistol,
flamethrower

Three tools on one key (F). Bullets are real, visible projectiles, never an instant hit: they fly, they dig the ground like a shovel, and the damage pops up where they land. Explosions chain. Fire burns letters for good.

Every hit counts. Small beasts take 1, grazers 2, the wolf 3, the drake 6. What dies bursts into shards.
Not everything waits for you. A hungry wolf hunts on its own, and bites you when you get in the way.

04

The shape shows
the function

Letters are the plating: paid when you build, recovered when it breaks. Punctuation is the frame: free, it evaporates. Nothing is decorative: you read a machine like a blueprint.

BELT. Letters are cargo: they ride, they queue, they are sorted by what they are.
DRILL. A derrick: the bit bores three wide and the harvest visibly climbs its cased well.
+------------+
|   BINDER   +==
| [........] |
+----vvvv----+
BINDERThe bookbinder. Program a word and it makes it again and again as soon as the stock covers it. Its window fills letter by letter, and it rebuilds what breaks.
T| |    +-------+     /-----\
U| |    | CRATE |    ( STILL )
B| |    |#####--|     \--+--/
E| |    +-------+
 (o)
TUBE · CRATE · STILLThe tube wears its name on its wall and lifts letters in plain sight. The crate's gauge is written in its body. The still crystallises substances into letters.
H\      /       SORTER      GATE
 O\    /        =[E.]=      =::=  open
  P\  /          vv         =||=  shut
   P\/
    E:
    R:
HOPPER · SORTER · GATEThe hopper's slopes roll what falls in down to its throat. The sorter shows the letter it sorts; it drops through the trapdoor and the rest rides over.
Extract
DRILL · AUGER · BORER
Convey
BELT · TUBE · HOPPER
Sort
SORTER · GATE · SCREEN · SIFTER · SPLITTER
Transform
BINDER · KILN · STILL · PRESS · BLAST
Store & flow
CRATE · PUMP · VALVE
Logic
WIRE · IF · SUM · LEVER · PISTON — circuits whose signals are letters
Structure
LAMP · LADDER · GLUE · HEARTH
Vehicle
FRAME · TREAD · BOILER — a rolling steam platform

Copy a whole build as a blueprint (C) and stamp it again, raze an area (Shift+C), undo (Ctrl+Z). Your HEARTH is your core and your respawn: if it breaks, the game is over.

05

Fifty-three species,
five tribes, one wyrm

Every creature is a drawing you learn to read, and its word is its count. They graze, hunt, lurk, flee, breed and grow old. A killed creature bursts into shards; creatures never create letters, they only move them.

The herd. Elephant, giraffe, horse, zebra, bison, deer, goat, boar.
Small folk. Hen, rabbit, hedgehog, tortoise, armadillo, lizard, scorpion, spider, crab, mouse.
The pond. Fish, trout, pike, eel, duck, heron, frog.
  • BIRD
  • HAWK
  • WOLF
  • DEER
  • GOAT
  • PIG
  • FISH
  • MOTH
  • MOLE
  • SPIDER
  • BEETLE
  • CRAB
  • BAT
  • NEWT
  • DRAKE
  • EEL
  • SALAMANDER
  • GRUB
  • ZOMBIE
  • HORSE
  • ZEBRA
  • GIRAFFE
  • BISON
  • BOAR
  • ELEPHANT
  • HEN
  • DUCK
  • HERON
  • TROUT
  • PIKE
  • VIPER
  • WORM
  • CENTIPEDE
  • ANT
  • FLY
  • BEE
  • FROG
  • RABBIT
  • KANGAROO
  • LIZARD
  • CROCODILE
  • MOUSE
  • SQUIRREL
  • HEDGEHOG
  • TORTOISE
  • ARMADILLO
  • SCORPION
  • TARANTULA
  • HUMAN
  • WYRM
Birds steal
A loose letter ends up in a BIRD's beak, then in its NEST. Hit the nest and the loot falls back.
Moths circle
They find your lamps. Hives and anthills defend themselves: break one and the swarm comes for you.
Villages trade
HUMAN hamlets have trades, beds, crops and a merchant who barters with you.
Tribes clash
Five colours: yours, green farmers, red raiders, timid blues and curious golden traders who also live underground.
The WYRM listens
A unique boss lives in the rock itself. A working drill's noise calls it; it eats drills and your hearth, and breaks on the fourth hit.
Cries you can read
An ! above a head is alarm, a ? is curiosity. Hunger, fear and temper decide the rest.

06

A world that
spells itself

Endless sideways, drawn again for every seed. There are no levels: the world gets stranger the deeper you dig, and darker too, so lamps become a necessity.

Down there. Light fades with depth; only what you bring shines.
  1. Living soilRoots, burrows, moles.
  2. StoneVeins that spell their own matter, in order when there is room.
  3. KarstCaverns, lakes, stalactites and seven kinds of mushroom.
  4. BaseGranite, and the ruins of old builders with machines left behind.
  5. ForgeFrozen lakes under the heat.
  6. AbyssA sea of lava.
Five biomes
Forest, plains, desert, rock and jungle, each with its own flora.
Sand flows
Undermine a beach and it pours out, grain by grain, letter by letter.
Trees fall
Cut a redwood's trunk and everything above comes down. TIMBER!
Weather turns
Rain, snow, storms and smog; a veil hides what you have not seen yet.
Everything glows
Lamps, fire, quartz, letters in transit: each living thing radiates its own colour. The ground stays matte.
Matter moves
Water, fire, steam, smoke, ash, lava, snow and ice all behave, and all of it is made of letters.

07

Fire is the sink,
the still is the source

A closed economy needs a leak, or numbers climb and nothing costs anything. Here it is fire: every burned letter leaves the economy for good. The ledger is kept exact, letters plus burned equals a constant, and the tests check it.

Seven letters exist nowhere in the ground. You don't mine them, you make them.
Condensed substanceCrystal wordLetter
WaterWATERW
SteamVAPORV
Four swallowed flamesONYXX and Y
SmokeSMOKEK
AshASHH

What gives the game its shape: K only comes from condensed smoke, so you must already have burned to build the burner. The Grimoire (G) tracks seven tiers of progress and research you pay by spelling.

08

Record it,
share it

Every clip on this page was recorded by the game itself. Press Shift+F12: a red dot tells you it is rolling. Press it again: the GIF lands in the GIFs folder next to the game and on your clipboard, so Ctrl+V drops it straight into Discord.

Light by default
Half the window, 20 frames a second, and only what moves is rewritten: seconds of play weigh a few hundred kilobytes.
Sharp on demand
Options > GIF SIZE switches to the full window for the finest clips.
Never in the way
The red dot is on your screen, not in the GIF. It turns amber past 10 MB, Discord's limit for a free account.

↓

Play the beta

It is a work in progress, written in Rust, and it runs. The download is always the latest build: when the game changes, this link changes with it.

Download Alphactory.exe

Windows · 64-bit · about 12 MB · no installer, no account

  1. Put Alphactory.exe in a folder of its own: saves, settings and your GIFs are written next to it.
  2. The beta is not digitally signed yet. If Windows says “Windows protected your PC”, click More info, then Run anyway.
  3. Press H in the game for every key, in your keyboard's layout.

The essential keys

A D
walk
W
jump, jetpack
F
shovel · pistol · flamethrower
Left click
use the tool
Right click
vacuum letters, put away
Enter
spell a word
B
catalogue of machines
E
pocket
G
grimoire
R
rotate
F5 F9
save, load
Shift+F12
record a GIF

✎

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happened

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